Is Unf*ck Yourself Empowering?
Or is it just perpetuating the conflation of sex and aggression?
A male friend once told me about a work assignment that he didn’t want to have foisted upon him by his female supervisor. He said, “If I’m going to get screwed side-ways with a railroad spike, she at least better buy me flowers afterward.” I was so shocked, I didn’t say anything to him at the time, but it made me really uncomfortable. This is a very kind and caring man and I don’t believe he had any intent other to convey his displeasure over the potential assignment, using terminology that has become so ubiquitous that it didn’t even register to him how much sexual aggression it conveyed. But it sure registered for me because of the graphic description and it got me really thinking about the casual conflation of sex language and rape imagery to indicate something unpleasant in an everyday context.
When people talk about getting screwed or getting fucked, they mean that someone has done something unpleasant to them against their will. This perpetuates a rapey “sex as power” paradigm and for that reason, I’d really like to see go out of casual usage although I don’t actually think there’s a chance that it will. Those terms are in such pervasive use that even most women I asked about it didn’t feel uncomfortable or offended by them. In fact, several of them said they themselves routinely use those same terms.
Fucked (meaning messed up) and unfucked (meaning fixed or rectified) began as military slang, which is not surprising since there is a lot of conflation with sex and power in the informal language of the military.
Adele Wilson states: “Military language, especially slang, rhymes, and chants, are overtly marked by references to sex”.
As (Susanna) Trnka underlines: “there are the songs and rhymes that explicitly link images of sex with joining the army or with killing itself”. She exemplifies this statement with one of the most popular military chants from boot camps: “This is my rifle, / This is my gun. / This is for killing / This is for fun,” in which the gun is associated with a phallus. The author stresses that the chant “conveys a powerful, if more subtle, equation between war and sex. By equating the penis with a ‘gun’, the rhyme functions to acculturate the military recruit into a frame of mind that equates sex with violence, and killing with ‘manhood’. This is how, according to the rhyme, killing is like sex: killing is fun.”
From the military, these terms came into common usage amongst civilians as well. Acronyms such as SNAFU (situation normal all fucked up) and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition) are used outside the military by people who may not necessarily even know what they stand for. We’re screwed or I’m fucked are phrases that are used every day by ordinary people with no overt intention to demean women or endorse rape culture. But none-the-less, words do matter and our subconscious mind reacts to hearing them in such frequent use, even as our conscious mind often tunes out what they really imply.
When someone talks about unfucking themself, a term that seems to have gained a certain cache in the personal growth industry, they really aren’t just talking about getting their life together in a cool and casual way because intentional or not, it’s perpetuating the idea that undoing the fucking that was done to you is necessary. It’s equating all sex with rape and as a sex-positive person and someone who cares about the subconscious impact of language on our lives, that’s not OK with me.
Cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, says, “We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say. We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts — concepts. When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system.” Metaphor is an important component of this.
Lakoff, George. Moral Politics (p. 4). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
The TV advertising industry alone is a 70 Billion dollar enterprise, with ample data points to indicate that it’s money well spent. In other words, what we put into our brains impacts us, even if we would like to pretend that it doesn’t. Even when we are well aware that we are being sold something, even if we are using phrases without their original intent, it’s still affecting our subconscious mind.
George Lakoff says, “Only a tiny amount of our thought is conscious. A typical estimate is about 2 percent, with about 98 percent of thought unconscious. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious. The more that a neural “idea-circuit” is used, the stronger it gets — and may eventually become permanent, effectively “hard-wired.”
Given the overwhelmingly negative connotation of fucked as rape imagery, is it even possible to actually use the un version of that in a positive way? Gary John Bishop wrote a New York Times Bestselling book called Unf*ck Yourself: Get out of your head and into your life. It is billed as “not your usual self-help book” and is further described in this way: “This is blunt force trauma to the way you think life has to be for you. Most importantly, it is designed to give you an authentic leg up — one that feels genuine and right for you, and can propel you to new levels of greatness.”
I get that he is trying to convey a down to earth sensibility that offers pragmatic ways to deal with life and everyday stress, but I’d never read that book, just because of the title alone. I suppose many people read it precisely because of the title because it sounded edgy and not like regular self-help, which tends to be considered somewhat feminine. They may like that allusion to military language — even if it’s misogynistic, and regardless of whether or not they have any conscious understanding of either of those things — because it feels tough, rather than vulnerable (and therefore weak).
But as vulnerability researcher Brene Brown has discovered, vulnerability isn’t weakness at all, despite the fact that we’ve pretty much all been socialized to believe that.
Our rejection of vulnerability often stems from our associating it with dark emotions like fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment — emotions that we don’t want to discuss, even when they profoundly affect the way we live, love, work, and even lead. What most of us fail to understand and what took me a decade of research to learn is that vulnerability is also the cradle of the emotions and experiences that we crave. We want deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper or more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Braving The Wilderness, Brene Brown
So, can you truly engage in real personal growth without vulnerability? As a life coach for the past 15 years, I’m gonna have to say N.O. There is absolutely no meaningful or substantive way to move your life forward or to expand as a person without getting really vulnerable. Is Bishop’s book useful or helpful even though it seems to shun vulnerability and uses tough-guy language to grab your attention? Honestly, I have no real idea. It’s a bestseller, so possibly. Maybe the title is just a way to entice people in who might not have otherwise picked up his book?
Other memes and programs have promoted this same idea that it’s badass to unfuck yourself. Vishen Lakhiani has YouTubes about making yourself Unfuckwithable, and although that lands just slightly better for me, it still is conflating sex and power in a really negative way that I personally don’t care for. Most other people I’ve talked to about this find it not really that big a deal. They tend to think I’m over-reacting, but I don’t actually think that I am. The world is made up of the stories that we tell about it. The words we use have power and meaning whether or not we are conscious of that in play. As neuroscientist Mayim Bialik says, “Language sets expectations.”
Our culture is very much still a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, despite some improvements in recent years. White men are 31% of the US population but they hold 65% of all elected offices. Men still make up an overwhelming majority of top earners across the U.S. economy, even though women now represent almost half of the country’s workforce. There are more Fortune 500 CEOs named John then there are women. A society based in a dominance hierarchy is pyramid-shaped, with only a small number of elites at the very top. Mobility on the societal ladder takes place through ruthless competition. It’s a dog eat dog world, or so we are taught to believe.
Within that context of the constant jockeying for a small number of elite positions, those who have been historically lower down the pyramid of power need to be reminded of their place. This is in large part what racism is, and overwhelmingly what misogyny is. It is far less about actual hate than it is about policing people back into line who are getting ideas about rising up the ladder or having equal access to power. Sometimes you have to remind them who is boss.
Fucked and screwed are two such reminders. People who are getting penetrated against their will are women, or at least those who have less power, in the way that women do. I don’t see any real possibility of using those terms or any variation of them in an empowering way. It may seem like that on the surface, and even feel that way in the conscious mind, but in the world of the unconscious mind, where most of our thinking actually takes place, it is continuing to normalize and reinforce sexual aggression as a part of jockeying for place in the dominance hierarchy. It’s perpetuating patriarchal language and norms, and although I fully expect those terms to continue in usage, perhaps at least a few people who read this will think twice before using them in the future.
